Islamic Fundamentalism is an Evil in Your Midst.

‘Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal
webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his
now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan — namesake of a 14th-century
Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary
for their brutalization of non-Muslims.

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim
country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years.
This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of
the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the
past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a point in the race timed to
achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with
improvised explosive devices. IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude
explosives and unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers.
The bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of
people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But that’s not
the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of everyday life.
IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily camouflaged amid the traffic,
the everyday debris, and the eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad
to cross the finish line.

Willful
blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade
Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and
thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have
been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the
instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest
“Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario — namely, that
jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked
innocent civilians — became the least likely scenario in the minds of media
pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white
conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions. As our
Kevin D. Williamson quipped,
the “literal Caucasians” they got were not quite what they had in
mind.

To listen to the commentary was to assume that the jihad’s nimble
post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs had never
happened. Prior to 2009, much agitprop was made over the thousands of American
troops killed and maimed by IEDs in Iraq — they signified, the Left told us,
that George Bush had brought al-Qaeda to previously jihad-free Baghdad. So did
IEDs at the Marathon mean the same jihad had now come to Boston? Perish the
thought. Surely the Marathon bombing was the work of either the right-wing
extremists Janet Napolitano has been warning
us about since 2009, or those notoriously violent Catholics and Evangelicals
that today’s Army equates
with Hamas and Hezbollah.

But no: It was in fact the jihad that
stubbornly refuses to be wished away. It will have to be defeated. It was never
a molehill we were exaggerating into Mohammed’s mountain. After 1,400 years of
aggression, we can safely say it is not anytime soon going to evolve
into the ballyhooed “internal struggle for personal betterment” — not for the
tens of millions of Muslims for whom Islamic supremacism is, quite simply,
Islam.

So will we be roused to meet the challenge? Doesn’t seem like it.
On Friday morning, the damning and utterly predictable details began pouring in
the second the jihadists were identified — “Outlook: Islam”; a YouTube playlist
called “Terrorists” that included the ditty, “I will dedicate my life to jihad”;
a wife who abruptly converted to Islam and began dressing in what a neighbor
called “the Islamic style”; an apparent reverence for the notorious
sharia jurist Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. Yet the media commentary, even if it
grudgingly mentions these things, internalizes none of them. “How shocking it
is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev want to mass-murder
Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and the Chechens’ beef is with
the Russians, not us.”

Good grief. It is the Uighurs all over again.
You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from
the Xinjiang region of China, detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in
Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East
Turkistan Islamic Movement). At least some of them fought against American
forces. Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our
government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because they
weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China, right? After all,
Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice people, so why should we assume
they might have a problem with us?

We are in a war driven by ideology.
“Violent extremism,” which is the label the government and the commentariat
prefer to put on our enemies, is not an ideology — it is the brutality that
radical ideologies yield. Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To
challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and
confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and
biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian
nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they
distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as
Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to
the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace
else.

The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying
it out loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and they
don’t care, even a little, what you think.

You do not defeat an ideology
by hoping it will change or disappear. You have to challenge it, to make it
defend its baleful tenets in the light of day. You cannot protect yourself from
its violent outbursts absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting
that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and
committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one
that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they
strike.

Asked about his “outlook,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered a pregnant
response, “Islam,” that raises more questions than it answers. There are all
kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than
we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we
are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic
supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our
recurring nightmare.

My Journey

About Me

I've recently retired as a Minister in the Presbyterian Church of Wales,and am now working full-time for Voice Ministries, my media ministry, which publishes the Christian News & Views magazine called 'The Voice' in addition to my books of Christian verse, all of which come under the publishing division, Voice Publications.
Voice Ministries also has a music division called Sheer Joy Music.
I have written a large number of Hymns and Worship Songs and also a lot of easy-listening, popular songs, many of which are available on CD and which can be found in the on-line shop at www.sheerjoymusic.com
My aim in life is to serve the Lord Jesus in any and every way that I can as long as I have breath.